Walk into ExCeL for Technology for Marketing 2026 and you could play a simple game – count the stands that didn’t mention AI. You’d be finished before you reached the coffee queue.

Over the 23^rd and 24^th of September, more than 10,000 marketing and ecommerce people gathered in Docklands for TFM, which this year shared a single ticket with eCommerce Expo and the brand new Parcel+Post Expo. Over 200 exhibitors, 10 conference theatres and an awful lot of lanyards.

I went with a shortlist. Shopify, Brevo, TikTok, KIME, Optimizely and Dotdigital are platforms our clients either use, ask us about or really should be asking us about. Here’s what I saw, what I heard, and what I think it means for food and drink brands heading into 2027.

What was Technology for Marketing 2026 really about?

In short, AI that does things rather than AI that writes things. For the past couple of years the conversation has been about generating content. This year it moved on to agents, automation and whether your data is good enough for any of it to work.

Richard Shotton, author of The Choice Factory, set the tone with a keynote on how buying journeys are changing through AI search, social discovery and shopping assistants. Adobe’s Shaun McCran put it more bluntly over on the commerce side: “AI is a decision-making solution. To make good decisions, you need good data”. Very true.

Shopify and the arrival of agentic commerce

Shopify’s Joe Strolz shared the Headline Stage with Hilary Platt of OpenAI and Jonathan Whiteside, CTO of DEPT, for a session on how agentic commerce is reshaping retail. If you haven’t come across the term yet, agentic commerce is AI that shops on the customer’s behalf. It finds, it compares and increasingly, it buys.

The advice from the panel was refreshingly practical. Strolz’s message was to automate the non-essential work so you can “spend more of your time on customer experience or product development”. Whiteside drew a neat line between people and machines: humans for the empathetic tasks, AI for the dispassionate ones like forecasting.

For food and drink brands selling direct, this really matters. If an AI agent is choosing between your hot sauce and a competitor’s, it is reading your product data, not admiring your packaging. Clean titles. Full ingredient and allergen information. Descriptions that actually describe. The boring stuff has quietly become the important stuff.

TikTok Shop: entertainment first, checkout second

If one platform had the room on day two, it was TikTok. Giulia Yang from TikTok’s growth and strategic partnerships team gave me my quote of the show: “People don’t open TikTok to shop; they open it for entertainment”.

That’s the whole brief in one sentence. The brands doing well on TikTok Shop aren’t running a catalogue with a soundtrack. They make something people want to watch, then make it very easy to buy.

The practical sessions backed it up. Emily Booroff of Social Climbers Collective, the TikTok partner agency behind the show’s Live Shopping Studio, walked through listings, affiliates, GMV Max ads and live selling, plus the framework she says is delivering over £100k a month in sales for clients. Peter Bollons of Slick Gorilla told the story of launching a TikTok Shop in three weeks during Q4, with plenty of honesty about what was “good enough for now”.

Food and drink is made for this format. Taste is hard to sell in a static image. It’s a lot easier when someone is biting into it on camera.

Brevo, Dotdigital and the loyalty question

Loyalty came up everywhere, and not in a fluffy way. Kate Hammond of Sunbeam Marketing made the point that a rush of sign-ups “doesn’t mean anything if those customers aren’t repeating”. Melody Courtois, Senior CRM Manager at LEON, said people “will have deeper connections with brands they really identify with or feel rewarded by”.

Two of my shortlist were tackling this head on, both on the CX and Loyalty Stage.

Brevo’s Channing Ferrer was joined by Lucyna Janas, Head of Google Wallet EMEA, to talk about the wallet as an engagement channel. The idea is simple. Your loyalty card, voucher or offer lives on the customer’s phone next to their bank card, works alongside email and SMS, and you don’t need to build an app to get there. For a coffee chain, a bakery group or a brand running an on-pack promotion, that’s a far lower barrier than an app nobody downloads.

Dotdigital’s Frank Brooks, Head of EMEA Marketing, spoke about how personalisation works in the real world, moving past generic personalisation towards real-time, behaviour-led messages. Dotdigital is a long-standing Shopify Plus technology partner, so for brands already selling through Shopify it remains one of the more natural fits for email, SMS and automation.

AI search visibility: why KIME was on my list

Regular readers will know I’ve been banging the AEO and GEO drum for a while now. So KIME, on stand M55, was a must-visit.

KIME tracks how AI models describe, rank and cite your brand across ten AI engines, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. You get a visibility score, share of voice, sentiment and, most usefully, the sources those models are citing. It also has an execution layer that can pick up tasks like outreach emails, blog content and technical fixes.

Here’s why that matters. When someone asks an AI tool for the best oat milk for coffee, there is no page two. You’re in the answer or you’re not. Tools like KIME turn that from guesswork into something you can measure, and measurement is where budgets come from.

Optimizely and the art of choosing

The Optimizely talks were the most grown-up of the lot. Ali Hart, Product Marketing Director for AI, took on how to prioritise when anything is possible. Joey Moore, AI GTM Lead, followed on day two with what makes AI work for marketing once you get past the model itself.

The thread running through both was focus. There are more AI tools than any marketing team can use well. The brands that win won’t be the ones that try everything. They’ll be the ones that pick two or three, plug them into good data and make them earn their keep.

It echoed the Shopify panel nicely, and a line from Klaas van Raaij of Incard on AI governance that I’ve already borrowed twice since: “Give AI a career path, not the keys”.

What it means for food and drink brands in 2027

Strip away the stand graphics and a few clear priorities come out of two days at ExCeL.

Sort your product data. AI agents and AI search tools both read it before a human ever does.
Treat TikTok Shop as a sales channel, not an experiment, and make the content entertaining first.
Look hard at wallet passes for loyalty and promotions, particularly in foodservice and on-pack.
Start measuring your AI visibility now. You can’t improve what you can’t see.
Plan for an earlier peak. IMRG’s Matt Walsh noted that 15% of retailers were already running promotions by Halloween last year.
Pick fewer tools. Use them properly.

Technology for Marketing 2026 was one of the most useful shows I’ve been to in a while, mostly because the talk finally caught up with what the tools can actually do. Less hype. More plumbing.

If you’d like to talk through what any of this means for your brand, from TikTok Shop to AI visibility, get in touch with the jellybean team. We’d love to have that conversation.